Your Digital Kids

Kids Create DIY Porn

We’ve been paying a lot of attention to legislators as they attempt to rid the web of predators and purveyors of child porn. But, while we’ve all been looking at predators, we haven’t been paying attention to what the kids are doing. They’ve become creators of their own pornography.
With inexpensive digital cameras, video cams, low-cost PCs, and a bit of teenage risk-taking behavior, we’ve got kids all over the country snapping photos and shooting video of themselves engaged in or letting the world know that they’re ready for sex.
At Fresno State, researchers recently studied 700 MySpace.com web pages and found that nearly 60 percent included risque/sexual poses. Of those pages, some of the most sexually suggestive content was found on the pages belonging to 14 and 15-year-olds (71 percent).
This week in Florida the courts found two teenagers facing child porn charges because they’d taken videos of themselves while having sex. The video found its way onto the web, even though the teenagers say they only emailed from one of their addresses to another.

New York Magazine’s cover story looked at the lives of young 20-somethings who are comfortable broadcasting the most intimate details of their lives online. Calling it the biggest generation gap since rock ‘n roll, the magazine suggests that older folks don’t understand this major shift in conscience from having a private life to having none.

Me, I think kids haven’t changed from the days when I was one, but the tools have. Take a risk taker without a strong notion of consequences, couple him with the Internet and some multimedia tools, and you’ve got a recipe for Kiddie Porn. Kiddie Porn made by the kiddies themselves. The problem deserves as much of our attention as do the more grown up predators who rob kids of their youth. It seems as if they’re perfectly capable of robbing youth from themselves.